Trying to wrap my head around: Fascists vs. top U.S. general over 'Critical Race Theory'

Tucker Carlson: Critical race theory will lead to the genocide of white Americans.

Hard to wrap my head around this one...A battle royale between MAGA white supremacists and the Joint Chiefs of Staff over Critical Race Theory. No, I'm not kidding. And it's no joke. 

Gen. Milley: 

“I do think it’s important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read...and it is important that we train and we understand,” Milley said. “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin,” Milley said during the hearing. “That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country from which we are here to defend?”

 Tucker Carlson:

He's not just a pig, he's stupid. So, Mark Milley reads Mao to understand Maoism. He reads communists to understand communism. But it's interesting that he doesn't read white supremacists to understand white supremacy. Why not? Go to the source.

Former POTUS:

Trump, who bypassed other top military officials to promote Milley to the top uniformed military post in 2019. “I watched the statements of some others, your head of the Navy, it was pathetic. “They didn’t talk that way when I was around, I can tell you. They didn’t talk that way or I would have gotten rid of them in two minutes.” 

Contrast this with the way they MAGAs destroyed Colin Kaepernick's football career after he took a knee against racism. They claimed he was "disrespecting our men and women in uniform."

Physician, heal thyself... Conservative cold-warriors of both the pro-Trump and anti-Trump variety, posing as oracles of democracy (everywhere but here) need to take a hard look in the mirror. Here's anti-Trump conservative, Jay Nordlinger writing in National Review, 

For decades, I heard from the Left that Fidel Castro was popular with “his people.” For many years now, I have heard the same about Vladimir Putin and Russia — from the Right, usually. The answer in both cases: If that’s true, why doesn’t he allow free and fair elections, to prove it? 

The question he should be asking is, why don't we? 

Republicans on Tuesday blocked the most ambitious voting rights legislation to come before Congress in a generation, dealing a blow to Democrats’ attempts to counter a wave of state-level ballot restrictions and supercharging a campaign to end the legislative filibuster.

WaPo reports at least 250 new restrictive voting laws have now been proposed in 43 states. It's impossible for former colonial powers to credibly call for "democracy" in other countries when white supremacy and fascism are growing trends at home. 

No, not in Xinjiang... but in Canada where for decades, Indigenous children were taken from their families, sometimes by force, and housed in crowded, church-run boarding schools, where they were abused and prohibited from speaking their languages. Thousands vanished altogether. Now, the remains of as many as 751 people, mainly indiginous children, had been found in unmarked graves on the site of another former Indian boarding school.

Fearful of confronting their own colonial and imperial histories, the new Cold Warriors are arrogantly targeting China once again. They are bankrolling and encouraging secessionist movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan and sending warships into the South China Sea. That's how cold war turns to hot war. 

R.I.P. ~ One of my favorite singer/slide guitarists from back in the day, Ellen McIlwane who played alongside the great ones, but never got the credit she deserved. 

“The guys all had their girlfriends along, and I was relegated to being one of the girlfriends until we got onstage,” she told the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer.

Vouchers for private schools: This is what passes for 'school reform' in D.C.

D.O.E.-- The Education Pentagon in D.C.

Posting from D.C. --Remember back in 2010 when Michelle Rhee was ruling the roost in D.C.? Rhee, with plenty of back-up from Arne Duncan and the Gates Foundation, became one of the superstars of the Waiting For Superman set, and D.C. was touted as the model for corporate-style, urban school reform. Duncan even used his position as Secretary of Education to stump for Rhee's patron, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty.

How the mighty have fallen. Rhee has left the world of corporate reform to go to work for a fertilizer company. After she was booted out of Washington came the revelations about her role in a major test-cheating scandal.

Spending this past week in the D.C. area has given me a closer look at Rhee's school reform legacy which goes hand-in-hand with the whitenizing of the District. In 2011, Washington’s black population slipped below 50% for the first time in over 50 years.

Not only is the city’s African American population shrinking — almost half of the District’s 650,000 residents are white — but it’s getting harder to be black in the nation’s capital. -- Washington Post

Petworth

Neighborhoods like Petworth are losing their public schools, as gentrifiers increasingly choose other options, like privately-run, publicly-financed charter schools. MacFarland, the only public middle school in Petworth, was one of 15 Washington public schools closed in 2013.

Vouchers...Congress seems to have a weird obsession with D.C. school vouchers, writes Valerie Strauss at WaPo.

Congress created what is formally known as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program in 2004 as the only federally funded program that uses public money to pay for private school tuition, though the public has no say in how the schools are run or what is taught.

The D.C. voucher program has become the pet project of House Speaker John Boehner, who recently announced he is soon leaving Congress. Boehner this month introduced legislation to reauthorize the voucher program for an additional five years, and a bipartisan group of senators filed a companion bill to extend the program through 2025. (Pro-voucher Democrats also include two former mayors of D.C. Tony Williams and Fenty.)

In 2008, Rhee declared herself neutral on school vouchers But in 2011, she endorsed vouchers, saying that she supported "giving poor families access to publicly funded scholarships to attend private schools." Then again in a February 2011 speech before Georgia's legislature, she openly supported the D.C. voucher program as a supplement to the expansion of privately-run charter schools. She said that if a parent did not win the lottery to get a child into a charter school, then "who am I to deny them a $7,500 voucher to send their child to a great Catholic school."

This, even though a Washington Post review in 2012 found that hundreds of students use their voucher dollars to attend schools that are unaccredited. A previous report in 2007 found that some students in the program were attending private schools that had unsuitable learning environments and teachers without bachelor’s degrees.

The D.O.E.'s own evaluation of the voucher program found that it did nothing to raise measurable student learning outcomes.

The GAO reported that the local agency that administers the program lacks the “financial systems, controls, policies, and procedures” to ensure that federal funds are being spent legally. It also says the U.S. Education Department has not exercised its oversight responsibilities well enough.

Such is the state of what passes for D.C. school reform.

44 years after Dr. King's death attacks on unions continue

Dr. King in Memphis, 1968

"That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, AFL-CIO Convention, December 1961

Yesterday was the anniversary of the 1968 assassination of  Dr. King, who was killed while defending the rights of black public workers in Memphis, to unionize. How ironic then, 44 years later, to hear school reformer Geoffrey Canada's declaration of war on the teachers union.

Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone and co-star, along with Michelle Rhee, in the anti-teacher, propaganda film, Waiting For Superman, was quoted in Tuesday's New York Times:

Ms. Rhee and Mr. (Joel) Klein have a confrontational history with teachers’ unions. But some charter school leaders and other advocates have spoken of the need to lower the temperature of the debate and have turned their focus inward on improving their own schools.

“Folks are genuinely looking for opportunities to make peace and not war,” Mr. Canada said. “And I think that’s terrific. But someone has to make war.”

In making his declaration, Canada, who is fond of quoting Dr. King in his speeches, joined hands with the worst of the worst education privatizers and profiteers whose hatred of unions is understandable. They include, Rhee and Klein (front man for international criminal Rupert Murdoch), Micah Lasher, who runs Mayor Bloomberg's legislative affairs, and charter profiteer Eva Moskowitz. Together, they announced the formation of StudentsFirstNY, a heavily-funded group that intends to pour money behind anti-teacher union candidates in upcoming election campaigns.

******

Thanks to Richard Kahlenberg for sending me a copy of his and Moshe Marvit's new book, Why Labor Organizing should be a civil right. The book begins with the recounting of Dr. King's role in the supporting organized labor, which he considered part and parcel of the civil rights movement. King was also highly critical of those union leaders who had allowed racially segregated local unions into the AFL-CIO.

King declared in his famous Chaos or Community speech in 1967:

The displaced are flowing into proliferating service occupations. These enterprises are traditionally unorganized and provide low wage scales with longer hours. The Negroes pressed into these services need union protection, and the union movement needs their membership to maintain its relative strength in the whole society.

Behind the new push against teachers' unions

FOX in full bashing mode

Paul Thomas, writing for the British Guardian, reveals some of the motives behind the current assault on teachers and their unions. He points out that the new push against teachers' unions, cloaked in discourse about the damage done by "bad" teachers, comes from the right and ironically from some Democrats, like Arne Duncan. 

But the political attacks on teachers and unions, which come from both the left and the right, would likely not resonate as much as they have done, if it were not for the celebrity tour on the back of the documentary Waiting for "Superman", whose message has been perpetuated by celebrity reformers. Two of those, Bill Gates and Geoffrey Canada, share an entrepreneur status that suggests expertise on everything simply because they are wealthy.

Ultimately, writes Thomas, this PR campaign by corporate and political leaders has been effective, even if it remains inaccurate.

That the evidence-based inequity of teacher assignment is ignored, while the myth of the bad teacher is perpetuated, is evidence of the motivation behind the new reformers – an unspoken commitment to the status quo of this social inequity that benefits the very people so keen to lay charges against teachers and unions.

John Merrow, who seems to have shifted somewhat from his earlier support for the L.A. Times' teacher-bashing scheme, follows up with a pretty good post on Huffington, "More on Teacher Bashing -- Getting Proactive.

Stopping teacher bashing is not enough. Nor is "better communication" between labor and management. What's needed is a proactive effort to make teaching a better job. 

Canadian forces mobilize to turn back Ayers invasion

Canada is now rivaling the state of Nebraska for the title of world's intellectual laughing stock. When UIC's Distinguished Professor of Education and author, Bill Ayers landed in Toronto to speak at a university conference, Dudley Do-Right and the RCMP quickly mobilized, funny hats and all, and turned him back at the border. They were obviously afraid that their U of T students would rise up in rebellion against them and stage an armed revolt against dull campus life, at just the sight of Bill?

[Jeffery] Kugler [executive director of the Centre for Urban Schooling at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto] said the Centre for Urban Schooling was left scrambling to cancel a busy day of appointments for Ayers. He had been scheduled to deliver a lecture at an inner-city teacher education program, to speak with principals and senior staff from the Toronto District School Board, to visit a classroom and to talk with community youth workers. Later, radio and television interviews were scheduled, followed by an evening lecture.

But NYT flat-worlder Tom Friedman has a completely different take on Ayers:

Indeed, dare I say, I hope Obama really has been palling around all these years with that old Chicago radical Bill Ayers. I hope Obama really is a closet radical. Not radical left or right, just a radical, because this is a radical moment.